Get Ready for the Richest Display Ad Units on the Web

HubPages is always ahead of the curve, so it should come as no surprise that we’re about to roll out one of the coolest, niftiest, most interactive ads on the web. Check out the unit!

This display ad was created as part of an advertising partnership with ClickTurn, an online leader in dynamic display advertising.

What is particularly exciting about this ad is not its size, but rather its potential for interactivity. The demo above, for example, includes embedded YouTube videos (don’t worry- they’re not on autoplay and the sound is muted), as well as home, Facebook, and Twitter feeds. The whole thing is like a miniature website- it’s fascinating!

Another cool aspect of this ad is that it does not interrupt your text the same way some ads can – your block remains intact and nicely framed by the colorful adverts, thus giving it a glamorous magazine feel instead of a spammy internet-junkyard aftertaste.

As you can tell, I’m quite excited about this- I hope we shall start seeing these on more hubs soon!

This looks great. I see some Hubbers are worried about the size of these ads and fear they’ll overwhelm our Hubs – but as you say, the resulting layout is not unlike a glossy magazine and I think it looks good.

I am a little concerned about how revenue sharing will work. On other sites,one of the reasons bad feeling arises is suspicion about whether revenue is being shared fairly. We avoid that at HP because of the transparent setup, where we earn directly from advertisers. If this new network will be paying us through HP, it could cause some friction.

As I pointed out to Jason on a forum thread, my concern is that the author resource box has disappeared. For those of us with a portfolio on Hubpages, persuading people to click through to our profile is extremely important.

With this layout, I suspect that people are much more likely to click away without exploring further. Jason mentioned about changing the ad levels, but I am not sure how that is going to make any difference to the new layout.

Hello Sufidreamer,
By changing ad levels, you can decline to host those type of ads on your page, thus maintaining the original layout with the sidebar box. That said, we’re in the process of designing several alternate ways of sharing your portfolio that are more effective than the sidebar boxes that will be offset by the advert, so by the time these become common, you probably wouldn’t even miss them! 🙂

@Writerguy, Jason pointed out in the forums that “large, innovative ad units typically perform quite a bit better in terms of revenue” hence I believe these ad units will help HubPages writers earn more- and yes, revenue will be shared with hubbers just as with AdSense, etc… 🙂